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Can we think of who wants to use a "versus" tag? I use e.g. the "perl" tag or the "c" tag on stackoverflow.com to find things I'm interested in. For example, I can easily imagine someone might want to add something like "british-english" to their list of interesting tags, if they're particularly interested in the UK. For another example, it's hard to search for questions about a, an and the, so it's a big plus to have an [article] tag which can be used to search for these kinds of questions. The tag should be useful for someone trying to find things, not just a kind of busy work for people who want to run around classifying stuff.

However, I can't imagine a scenario where someone wants to look for "versus" questions - adding this tag seems like busy work to me. Can someone suggest what the purpose of this tag is to justify keeping it?

If not, I propose deleting this tag.

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  • additional discussion here: meta.english.stackexchange.com/questions/172/… Sep 4, 2010 at 17:28
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    I think that the usage of tags here is fundamentally different from the use on SO. Aside from tags like etymology and learning, I don't see people being interested in groups of questions (like C# or php on SO). I mean, really, who's gonna follow the present-tense tag because they're particularly interested in the present tense? Sep 4, 2010 at 17:32
  • @Boofus: that is an argument for deleting the present-tense tag then. If the tag doesn't do any useful work, delete it!
    – delete
    Sep 5, 2010 at 1:29
  • @delete: But what if someone had a question about present tense and they wanted to use the tag in a search to see if we had that question covered already?
    – SamB
    May 4, 2011 at 5:03

1 Answer 1

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Personally, I think of "versus" and "word choice" as synonyms (at least in the way they are being used on this site) and suggested them as such. I don't know if other people feel the same way. So far, nobody has voted on any synonym suggestions.

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  • My question is specifically about who goes looking for "word choice" questions. Would anyone want to add this to their list of interesting tags, for example?
    – delete
    Sep 4, 2010 at 4:25
  • I think that the idea was using the tag versus for the questions that asked if to use a word or another one; for example, a question that asks which word to use, but it doesn't give a choice between two words, should not be tagged with versus (in this case, I would use the tag word-choice). Tags are also used to find questions that have the same topic of the question a user is reading. Generally speaking, users looks for questions, not tags, and tags are useful to find questions that are related to the question being read.
    – apaderno
    Sep 4, 2010 at 11:20
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    @kiamlaluno: Who is the "versus" tag intended for? Are there people who want to see a list of "versus" questions? I really doubt it.
    – delete
    Sep 4, 2010 at 14:12
  • @Shinto Sherlock: I only reported what the intent of who created the tag was. If then you ask me if we really need to have versus, and word-choice, I would reply that between the two tags I would keep word-choice because is more general; if you ask me about removing both the tags, then I would reply that I would not delete both the tags. As I said, users look for questions, not tags; tags are just a way to categorize questions, and they are used to find correlated questions starting from a question. [continue]
    – apaderno
    Sep 4, 2010 at 15:06
  • [continued] If somebody has doubts about the use of a verb, he doesn't start looking for every question tagged with verb. It is probable he will search for a question by entering the question as he would write it; if he finds a question that is close enough to his original question, he will read it, and he will click on the tag links that appear in that question to find other questions that are correlated with the one he read.
    – apaderno
    Sep 4, 2010 at 15:12
  • @kiamlaluno: Completely disagree with you. I use e.g. the "perl" tag or the "c" tag on stackoverflow.com to find things I'm interested in. The tag should be useful for someone trying to find things, not just a kind of busy work for people who want to run around classifying stuff.
    – delete
    Sep 4, 2010 at 15:13
  • @Shinto Sherlock: What do you do when you want to search a question about perl, for example? Do you go to the page listing all the questions tagged with perl, and read all the titles until you find one that you think it is correct, or closer?
    – apaderno
    Sep 4, 2010 at 15:41
  • @kiamlaluno: No, if I want to search under the perl tag I use the search feature which allows me to search for articles with a "perl" tag on them.
    – delete
    Sep 4, 2010 at 15:53
  • @Shinto Sherlock: Why do you think somebody would not do the same with word-choice?
    – apaderno
    Sep 4, 2010 at 17:18
  • @kiamlaluno: I am asking you that question: who is interested in seeing a list of [versus] questions or [word-choice] questions. If you can't justify that someone NEEDS the tag for something, then DESTROY the tag because IT ISN'T USEFUL.
    – delete
    Sep 5, 2010 at 1:31
  • @Shinto Sherlock: I have already replied about that. I will not "destroy" a tag because I think it is not useful; this is something that must be decided from other users too.
    – apaderno
    Sep 5, 2010 at 2:14
  • @kiamlaluno, I'm not specifically directing that at you and telling you to destroy it, it is what might be described as a "call to action".
    – delete
    Sep 5, 2010 at 4:40
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    Maybe we should tag any thread containing posts from both Shinto Sherlock and kiamlaluno as versus.
    – Kosmonaut
    Sep 6, 2010 at 15:17

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